My car has a 13-band EQ (40 Hz, 63 Hz, 100 Hz, 160 Hz, 250 Hz, 500 Hz, 1.0 kHz, 1.6 kHz, 2.5 kHz, 4.0 kHz, 6.3 kHz, 10 kHz, and 16 kHz.)
Could someone please explain what each of those bands means? What do they correspond to? (highs, mids, lows, bass, vocals, different instruments, etc.)
Thanks!
In: Technology
These are different frequency bands. Low numbers are low frequencies, meaning lows and basses, while high numbers are highs.
Basically you have lows, mediums, and highs, with some more steps in between for a more precise control.
Each of those bands is a specific frequency around which the band is centered. Increasing the volume of a band raises the relative volume of notes around that particular frequency.
Human hearing is, nominally, 20Hz-20kHz.
* Everything up to about 200Hz would be considered “lows”. Bass instruments and kick drums generally live in this range.
* 200Hz to about 2kHz is nominally “midrange”. Lower vocals, guitars, etc. tend to live here.
* 2kHz up to about 5kHz is going to be “highs”. Treble instruments and vocal melodies that sit “above” the rest of the instruments.
* 5kHz and above would be considered “brilliance”, which includes extremely high and bright instruments like cymbals, whistles, and the harmonics and upper range for treble instruments.
You can get as into-the-weeds as you like when it comes to defining frequency ranges like “upper-midrange” and the like, but this is a rough approximation of where instruments and vocals tend to fall.
The reason you have multiple bands within each range is that you can give each section sort of its own mini-EQ.
Within a given section, increasing the low-end will make that section sound warmer and smoother, but will lose clarity. Increasing the high-end will increase clarity but may cause it to sound tinny. Increasing the middle range will give it more “bite”, but can sound harsh.
Human hearing is roughly 20Hz-20kHz
The lower numbers are bass and the high numbers are treble.
A 13-band EQ allows you to more precisely dial-in the sound compared to a 2-band (bass & treble) or 3 band (bass, mids, and treble) EQ can offer.
However, if you don’t have measurement gear then it’s difficult to determine which bands to use. If you want to play with it, I’d hook up your phone and place a frequency sweep video on YouTube thru your car system, and whatever frequencies sound too soft or loud then find where they are most close to one of the 13 bands and boost/reduce the level accordingly. Meaning if at 6000Hz it sounds too sharp then on the 6.3k band turn it down.
Kinda like a sound is worth a 1000 words.
Honestly. i could spend a 1000 words trying to describe it, or you just crank one and hear the change it makes 😕
[While not necessarily easily understood in relation to music](https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/), that tone generator can give you a general idea of what each of those frequencies represent as far as how the EQ will control the levels of music around those frequencies.
I’ll try to eli5 this:
Sound is a (very mechanical) vibration. Your radio or whatever player sends electric signals that turn magnet in speakers or headphone on or off at rapid pace. This makes magnet move the paper glued to the magnet forth and back. Paper moves air molecules it collides with, and that movement of air (vibration) goes through your room or car, until it crashes against your ear drum and makes it move. Which makes you hear.
Middle-aged human ear [can hear from about 20Hz to 15 000Hz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM4WSBZanQQ). Hertz is an unit of how many vibrations per second happen. 40Hz means paper of a speaker (and the air, and your eardrum) moves 40 times per second. 16 000Hz means the vibration is very rapid (16 000 times per second). Very young people might hear up to 22Khz, but as you go older, it drops to somewhere about 16Khz. Dogs and rodents can hear extremely high frequencies that humans don’t register at all. That’s where “dog whistles” and “rodent noise repellents” come from.
You can think of it as trying to push a heavy thing along the floor – if you push it slowly, it will scrape floor slowly (less Hz) and growl. If you pushed it really fast, it will produce a sound closer to a whine, so more Hz.
So, the frequency of vibration translates to what you hear: to about 400 Hz, it’s bass. 1-2Khz or 1000Hz – 2000Hz is typical frequency of human voice, thus vocals in terms of music or talk in terms of well, talking shows, sports commentary, stand up, audiobooks and such. This is usually most important to most people.
And anything higher is treble, meaning hi-hats, hiss, high-pitched noise and such.
So, on your equalizer, you can set how much bass (drums, bass guitar), mid-range (vocals, piano, guitar, etc) and treble (hi hats, triangles, tambourines, etc) you want.
__________
…And yes, all sound is just wiggling of air (or other medium, like water). What you hear is just about how rapidly it moves per second. And simply the rate of vibration can produce human speech, your favourite song and everything else. There’s no deeper “magic” to it. So technically, if you could wave a piece of thin plywood at exact right frequency, you could make it sound like human talking – with words and voice and everything, for example. Or play your favourite song down to a lyric and note (not sure how you could wiggle something tens of thousands of times per second, though).
Science has measured all the sounds we hear, and the lowest, deepest sounds like thunder get low numbers, while the highest pitched sounds like hissing or when your sister screams get high numbers.
The scale we use to measure how we hear these sounds is called Hertz (Hz)
So when you want to adjust the way music sounds with an equalizer, slide the left one up for more thunder, or down for less, and so on from left to right.
40hz is the thumping sub
63hz is the kicking sub
100hz is the punching sub, the knocking sub, and the middle high bass. Lower male voice.
160hz is the higher bass, the end of the sub and into the regular woofer.
250hz is the middle-bottom sound of many normal instruments, the tip top of any bass frequencies, and a bit above the thunk of a snare.
500hz is like, the thwock of a clap or rimshot.
1000hz is the clarity excitement point of almost everything.
1.6kz is the same thing just higher
2.5kz is the tip top of the mid frequencies (in music! speech therapists have their own BS concept of lows and highs. Fight me). A lot of metallic sounds start here.
4kz is where a lot of S’s, T’s, F’s, etc get their definition. Scratchy noises live here.
Everything above this is various metallic cutting frequencies, sheens, and overtones. Some small metal instruments start above 4k.
NOTE that I am saying where the instruments’ lower sound “starts” or has a “fundamental”. By start I mean reading the sound as frequencies from left to right, bass to highs. All those instruments have overtones that is *most of their sound*. In fact if you cut the bottom, you would certainly still recognize the instrument but if you cut above that fundamental, you probably wouldn’t.
That’s crazy that your car has such a detailed EQ, given that the car stereo should already be pre-EQ’d to balance the car and a 3 band shelf is generally enough to slant the frequency balance to correct for taste or hearing impairment etc.
The top and bottom EQs are probably shelfs that respectively extend all the way up or down to cover the bookends.
What car is it?
All great responses. Here is the why and a how.
No space is the same when it comes to sound generation. Just as you tune your instruments, you turn your amplifier and speakers for the space it is in. The objects in the space as well as the construction of the space itself will attenuate certain bands of sound from speakers. If you have carpet and a 160 Gallon fishtank in your area vs tile floor, it will make a difference in how things sound.
If you have like a music studio, you want that area turned perfectly flat across the spectrum. To do something like this you play white noise through the speakers and then put a microphone where you would be sitting, listening, and you observe the spectrum the microphone is picking up. You will see something other than white noise coming back which is everything in the room messing with the frequencies. You then use your eq until the microphone reads white noise as well (flat across the spectrum) and you have turned your speakers and amp to produce a perfectly flat spectrum in that specific space.
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